many of the colonists, and the comparisons which I often heard them draw between times past and times present were not always to the advantage of the latter. It is true that the ladies had left off plaiting their husbands' hats from the straw of their own fields; neither was it any longer necessary for them, as in old times, to patch and mend worn-out boots, in order that one neat pair might be kept for Sundays until the arrival of some long-expected ship. Hats could now be purchased at the stores, and, if boots were wanted, both bootmaker and leather were at hand without any need for waiting for ready-made boots from England.
Neither were there any longer such primitive ways of conducting weddings as were related to me by an early colonist of a marriage at which she had assisted, when the bride and bridegroom were escorted by their friends, all on foot, through the bush to church, and afterwards accompanied to the banks of the Swan, where the pair embarked for their home in a little boat, with an old man in the bows playing on a fiddle, and with a goat and her kid, the property of the amiable bride, bleating discordantly somewhere amidships. Nowadays wedding parties drove very splendidly to church in "traps," as the vehicles resembling dog-carts are colonially called, and the number of these was quoted in deciding upon the merits of the affair, just as carriages are reckoned up on similar occasions in England. "A wedding of eleven traps" was something startling in its magnificence. But I used often to hear people express the opinion that what they had of late years gained in material comfort they had lost in sociability. One fact was especially dwelt
